I can't sleep, so

Thought of this thing I'm going to start, I guess, right now. I've been thinking for a while, especially since moving to Bed-Stuy, a more residential and poorer area than where I was before, of how to go about giving something back to the community somehow.

I've been in NY for 13 years now, and it's been pretty good to me. These days, I have more time available to me than most to do something, so I am.

Just got this email address: foodforfolks@gmail.com. That's also the name of the thing (without the @gmail.com, obviously).

The idea is pretty simple: "you email. we pick up. done." That's the slogan. Catchy, right?

What's that mean? Anyone in the city, available on the subway or bike-able from my place, can email me their address, and we (me for now) will come by and pick it up. Bring it all back to my house, box it up and take it to food pantries, etc. (not sure exactly how this part will work). Simple, huh?

No real cost to me or anyone else other than time. Besides the subway fare, which I usually have unlimited rides, anyway, there'd be the occasional taxi to get the stuff from my place to whatever place could use it.

What do we pick up? Food.

Please:
- no large containers: things that normal people buy at normal stores for themselves, I'm hoofing it non-carbon, here.
- non-perishables (think that'd be obvious, but)
- the healthier the better; we are trying to help people, after all.
- NO money. This is strictly a resource based project, word.

Have been a messenger in the past both bike and foot, so have the bag for it, at least. Good for me too, because it's mostly a solo venture. As much as I like other people, having to work with them can be problematic. I'll still get to deal with people, presumably (hopefully) quite a few--just not for too long, for any period of time either of us want to.

Makes sense to me. It's reverse-delivery or delivery donating; instead of supplying something demanded, the demand is to supply the provider of a service--and all for a good thing: feeding hungry people. It's the ease of delivery culture in major cities, that I'm so much a believer in, plus doing something good brought to your door.

I'm posting publicly as I write this for, at least, 3 reasons. One, to see if any of you have any ideas, comments, critiques, suggestions, etc.; another, to show the positive things that come from insomnia; the last, to force myself to follow through on it, after waking up later to day.

The 27's

Hendrix, Joplin, Robert Johnson, the guy from Badfinger, Jim Morrison, and 15 years ago, yesterday, Kurt Cobain. All dead by 27, and some none too prettily either. This guy just wrote a book about those above and other musicians who died at the age of 27. Not by the age of 27, but in that year.

Kurt Cobain, I remember well. One of the first deaths during my lifetime to actually affect me, Cobain's (apparent - not getting into it here) suicide, like most, bothered me not so much for the loss of the person but for the question: why?

Kurt is a good example of this. If at the time anyone was making bets on who in the world of entertainment, perhaps the world itself, would be most likely to off themselves, he would have been an odds on favorites. Still, even though it was almost as if his whole life and career had lead up to this, his violent death came as a shock; suddenly and, seemingly, "From Out of Nowhere" (great Faith No More song from the era).

Seen below, Cobain had just recently become the father of a baby girl. In interviews and on TV, it seemed as if the talk of Kurt finally getting control if not rid of his chronic heroin addiction might be true. From however humble (read: poor and unstable) a background he came from, and despite the effects of hard living, Cobain appeared to by "settling down."

Maybe that was the problem. According to some popular wisdom of the time, partially, it was. By that point, the inherent paradox of the corporate-sponsored usurpation/co-option/whatever of the "revolution" that was the Alt/Grunge/etc. scene, that was Nirvana, Kurt's band, was becoming unsustainable and for Cobain himself, unfortunately, unbearable.

(If unfamiliar with 90's alt-music culture: the "Diet Grrrl" on Francis Bean is a satirical--or maybe just clever--reference to the Riot Grrrl-cultura of which Courtney Love, Cobain's wife and FB's mother, was a icon for.)

(Yep, that's Francis Bean these days, age 16)

I also remember when I turned 28, and being pleasantly surprised I'd made it. I had heard of the magic and tragic #27, until that point having always worked in, around and/or playing music since adolescence.

To be sure, I was no heroin addict, chronic or other wise. (Lost a few friends who were, though.) No, but I definitely spent some years that I can't recall much of; think of it as a living-in-NY-as-a-young-punk tax. But most on the list of 27's didn't blow their brains out with a shotgun because they couldn't get off smack and couldn't stand being the most venerated musician of their time either.

Indeed, a constant of the 27's is the trouble of fame--what to most of us often comes off as out-of-touch or pretentious at best. But here, anyway, it seems relevant to what's going on: all things being equal, even without the pressures of fame, these are the folks (not all of them, but the ones who went messily and/or self-destructively) that would've been the most susceptible to the things one can do to oneself.

Whether or not the lives they led were made any worse is impossible to know. Perhaps their wild and crazy lives helped some to come out of the shells they would've otherwise wasted away in, long before the age of 27. Maybe that's just wishful thinking.

But, at least with Cobain, drugs or no drugs, he probably wasn't going to wind up being a people-person. That doesn't mean he wouldn't have been a good person, a good father.

Really, though: fuck all of us. It's not about what we missed out on, not about our loss. Rather, it's that Francis Bean never got to find out just what kind of person her father was.

Lord knows, with a mother like Courtney Love, a good dad would be of use.

Holy Crap! Italy, I'm so sorry.

Recently, in a rail against the Catholic Church, I went as far as to call for the carpet bombing of Vatican City. Well, in Rome, an earthquake just displaced tens of thousands, with the death toll at 150 and rising. Oops, my bad. I guess my vengeance was a bit off the mark.

So, for real Rome: sorry about this. But, then again, my mom always liked to warn me about my friends she didn't take kindly to: you lie down with dogs, you get fleas. The point is Italy, this is your fault for allowing these fanatics to reside in your country, the capital city, no less--Christ you people treat them like they're the Pope or something... oh, right.

Mi blogo loco

from Fox News

This is my second live-blog. Eh.

Here comes a statement from Gov Patterson: tragic day.

Apparently, an Asian-America in his twenties opened fire in a civic center for immigrant affairs. Supposedly, people were taking a citizenship class. Way to get out of class.

12 dead, up to 40 held hostage. Not known if this is over or not.


(Going to keep updating...)


Twitter (damn) and googlemaps are coming in handy.

The way they talk about guns belies their lack of knowledge: "a air...high-power air-gun." Air-gun? That would've been a good thing, unfortunately not the case.

First eye-witness interviewed live, young, white Italian-homeboy: saw two Asian males taken out in plastic hand-cuffs. They've said it's normal to put suspects or hostages out in cuffs because they can't know for sure which is which.

Oh, btw, I'm getting all this from a live feed online of a CNN international affiliate. The major channels need to just stream all TV live if they want to survive, and soon.

(...)

So I guess Asians are taking over from the skinny, ostracized, white dudes. Remember Virginia Tech of course. There was another shooting in the-boonies-VA recently, found when googling "shooting" looking for the one up here. Oddly, in more metropolitan VA, near where I grew up, around DC, there seems to have been a bunch of crazy shootings.

Eye-witness again: they were foreign. Reporter: they were Asian?

So, it is a Hostage Crisis In New York, reads the top of the screen, disgustingly splattered with blood. Who thought that was tasteful? They didn't.

Ah, well, I guess it is an international CNN--they just went to another story... about Pakistan.

(...)

Fox News: seems it's over. Lone gunmen has killed himself. Press conference at 4:30... I'll be back. May be 13 dead now.

(...)

This is the end, beautiful friend. The end. - JM

NBC News and news services

updated 4 minutes ago

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. - Twelve to 13 people were killed Friday whe n a gunman walked into an immigrant services center and opened fire, Gov. David Paterson said. A federal law enforcement official said the gunman was found dead in the building.

"I speak for all of New York when I offer my prayers for the victims and families of this tragedy," Paterson said hours after the gunman shot several people and took dozens hostage. The gunman first blocked the back door with his car, authorities said.

Two people were seen in handcuffs as they left the building, but NBC's Pete Williams said they were not suspects and that police were simply taking extra precautions as people left the building.

(...)

Make that 14 dead, including shooter. He was a south-Asian.

(...)

41 year old, named Wong.

I'm sorry, but, fuck!

The drug Plavix should not have to advertise. If someone needs to take it, a doctor should just give it to them without having it suggested by the patient because they happen to see a commercial on the wall mounted TV about it while recuperating--FROM THEIR HEART ATTACK.

If not, that's bad health care. What group of people are these? Had a heart attack, but didn't go to a hospital or see a doctor?

Or perhaps it's because their trying to scare the shit out of people who haven't had a myocardial infarction but have plenty of reason to be afraid. Plavix is tapping into the fear market that's ironically been developed by folks trying to do good and make people healthier.

Irony, absurdity, or pehaps the cold weather and crappy liquor?

A Russian human-rights activist, Lev Ponomaryov, was beaten up in Moscow. The attack followed the killing of a human-rights lawyer, Stanislav Markelov, earlier this year.

Really? Well, I've heard these peaceniks can be quite confrontational.

A prominent Chechen, Sulim Yamadayev, was reportedly shot dead in Dubai. Mr Yamadayev had fallen out with Chechnya’s president, Ramzan Kadyrov. He would be the fourth well-known opponent of Mr Kadyrov’s to be killed since September.

You know, sometimes I think I might have been better off staying in the land of my ancestry, eastern Ukraine and up through the Baltic states, beating up dissidents and murdering political opponents... maybe it's in the blood. Or maybe I just need to eat lunch.

(Thanks to The Economist for the italics.)

The above is an old Soviet propaganda poster of a supposedly common phrase back in the day: "And you are lynching Negroes," a response directed at America's hypocrisy for it's treatment of blacks while criticizing the USSR for it's lack of "freedom."

I would definitely hang out with Biden's daughter, even if we weren't doing cocaine.

Because she seems pretty cool, and, well, she's totally hot. We wouldn't even have to do any blow: she's hot. I mean, if Michael Phelps happen to drop buy with some killer stuff, that's one thing. But me and her, we'd have our own thang goin' on--no need for anything illegal. Sure, a few drinks, maybe a Car Bomb or two. She's at least part Irish, right?

In case you haven't heard, someone is trying to peddle a video to the tabloids of people snorting cocaine. We care because, apparently, one of the folks is V.P. Joe Biden's daughter, Ashley.

So, does it matter if it's really her? Of course--this kind of thing (sex, drugs, etc.) usually does. But for no more than our attention span for soft-core-poli-porn fantasies. I hope it was her, just so Biden might come off his usually-high horse about the "drug war" in this country.

But, then again, if it helps obscure further the role her father has played in their state's credit-card-haven, then maybe not. This is part of the "problem with capitalism," usury-gone-wild, that hasn't been addressed, (hopefully just not) yet. Talk about sub-prime. But unlike even a bad mortgage, there's not any equity behind the debt.

Some of the best advice I ever received, definitely the best from high school, was to avoid not only credit cards themselves--this was the mid-90's when dogs and college students started receiving competing company's cards in the mail everyday--but credit as an idea. The principle of owning without rescind comes from cash on the barrel-head.

The administration is talking tough on the world stage about lax banking regulation in Europe and elsewhere, "tax-havens" for U.S. corporations and individuals, which is great, don't get me wrong. But how about states in this country, like Biden's home state, Delaware, that let credit card company's have free reign-ge? What's good for the chicken, the state's other main output, isn't necessarily so for the debtor-industry. Care to guess who has been Biden's largest campaign contributor since the 80's? Yep.

(Whoever guesses the name of the many-time-elected Mayor of a major U.S. city, in the picture below smoking crack with a whore, wins a prize.)

Really, the only reason I wrote this post is so that I could put up the following Biden family photo. Dickie or ascot? You be the judge.

An epilogue for the down-twodden

From flavorpill.com Chi-town.

Everyone's a-Twitter these days — particularly politicians. President Obama's Twitter updates have been sporadic since the campaign ended, but John McCain reliably sends out curmudgeonly examples of "pork-barrel" spending. Claire McCaskill tweets her votes, as well as March Madness play-by-plays, and the Prime Minister of Britain even tweets from Downing Street. In Chicago, from 1st Ward Alderman Manny Flores to Cook County Commissioner Tony Peraica, local pols are slowly boarding the Twitterwagon. (Petition here for Senators Durbin and Burris to get with the program.) But I'm unconvinced that Twittering Congressmen really increase transparency and accountability for their constituents. So far, I think the most useful Chi-town government Twitter feed isn't from a news outlet or an elected official at all: it's that of sandwich-and-potato-pancake heaven Manny's Deli, the preferred cafeteria of local political figures, firefighters, and the fuzz. The folks at Manny's are tweeting their specials — for the kind of pork (and beef) spending the carnivores among us can actually support.

- Audrey Mast, Managing Editor

Let it die, man, let it die.

So much for Freedom

With the intent of making the building more marketable, developers of the space that used to be the Twin Towers have decided to "re-brand" the previously named Freedom Tower to simply, One World Trade Center. Apparently, this is in response to a Chinese company's intent to lease five floors of the un-built building. Ha. Freedom, my ass.

I guess I was right, an update.

Not too long ago, I wrote a post titled "Enemies at the Gates." In it I warned the robust loud-mouth, and his ilk, not to be too quick to hope for the worst just to have your "principles" (I can't stress those scare-quotes enough, here, people) be proven right:
Rush, you'd better hope it works--or yours will be one of the first gated compounds overrun by the evicted, out of work and hungry.

Okay, so I wasn't completely right--the "gates" were actually in Connecticut. And they weren't Rush's (damn). But a bunch of folks in buses did go to AIG executive's houses and made a scene. So that's pretty rad. Unfortunately, there were more reporters there than protesters. Or maybe not unfortunate: who'd you have standing in your front yard, peaceful protesters or the news media? Exactly.

(Thanks to The Economist for the above KAL cartoon of an AIG-angry mob.)

Greed isn't good. (or: The Ayn Rand/Mike Boolmberg non-exclusivity)

So says Collin Ferguson about Bernie Madaoff (see below) debacle, but specifically about the lacking in goodness of greed--despite the claims of Michael Douglas (see above).

In a rare defense of capitalism (of course, I recently gave a equally rare applause to capitalism), late night or otherwise, Ferguson reminded everyone that its guiding principle need not be greed, rather, "the money goes here, goes there," not to be hoarded up by a few. And though at first naive sounding, he's actually right.

In reality, that's exactly what usually happens. That's why trickle-down doesn't work as a stimulus--the rich are the only people that can afford to hoard monies received via tax breaks and not spend it in the economy. Middle and working class folks don't have the same luxury, they must spend.

I barely remember the banking meltdown of the late eighties; Wall St. mishigos and a housing bubble, then as now, was mostly to blame if not totally responsible for the mess. It was probably the first time I thought of a bank other than simply a place to keep money, ostensibly, safe. What I learned is that they weren't completely safe, actually.

I do remember the FDIC, and the little plastic plaques that were stuck up on the cold marble or bullet proof glass--depending on the neighborhood--that stated how individual savings accounts would be covered up to $100, 000. It seemed like a lot of money, at the time, and still does.

Of course, recently, the limit of protection has been increased to $250,000--for the rest of the year, anyway. So, if you have greater than $100, 000 and less than $250, 000, you'd better hope your bank fails by December 31st.

Wow

What great questions the President has been asked tonight:

Why didn't you come out sooner (a whopping couple of days) with your anger at AIG? I like to think about something before I talk about it.

The Homeless? The way the system's set up there's always been homeless. That's what fixing the economy can change. It's not acceptable in this country.

Has the last 64 days been color blind?

Stem cell ethics questions? (Predictably, Fox News) The science leads us.